1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a receipt printing processing method, a receipt printing processing system, and a printer that can be linked to an order entry system in a fast food restaurant, for example, for printing special order seals displaying information about special requests for products ordered by a customer when sales receipts are printed.
2. Description of Related Art
Fast food restaurants such as fast food hamburger restaurants are internally separated into a dining area and a kitchen. Customer orders are typically taken at an order counter between the dining area and the kitchen, and the orders are prepared in the kitchen. A POS register for inputting information about the ordered products and processing transactions, and a receipt printer for receiving the transaction processing data generated by the POS register when payment is completed and printing a receipt based on the transaction processing data, are generally installed at the order counter. A printer or display that is connected to the POS register is installed in the kitchen, and order instructions generated by the POS register based on the input product information are output by the kitchen printer or presented on the kitchen display when payment for the order is completed. The order is then prepared according to the order instructions, and the finished order is then wrapped, carried from the kitchen to the dining room, and delivered to the customer.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-H07-168980 is directed to an order entry system for fast food restaurants that installs an order entry and transaction processing terminal combining both the POS register and the receipt printer in the dining room, and relies on the customers to enter their own orders and complete payment for the order in a self-service model.
Special orders that change how particular products are prepared can also be accepted in fast food restaurants in order to accommodate a wide range of individual customer preferences. For example, hamburgers may be ordered without any pickles, mustard, lettuce, and/or mayonnaise. Information about such special orders is entered together with the ordered product information into the POS register, and sent together with any cooking instructions to the kitchen. The kitchen can therefore easily prepare a hamburger with a special request, while at the same time presenting regular hamburgers on the menu.
Hamburgers with special requests and regular hamburgers look the same, however, particularly when wrapped. A special order seal describing the special request is therefore prepared in the kitchen and applied to the wrapper of the finished order so that the special order can be readily identified and given to the correct customer. However, as the number of variations in the special orders that are possible increases, the number of special order seals that must be readied and kept available also increases. This greatly increases managerial overhead due to the need to order, store, and manage the inventory of numerous different special order seals.
In order to avoid the need to stock and manage numerous special order seals, the POS register may alternatively generate seal printing data for printing the special order seals and send the seal printing data to the kitchen printer to print the special order seal in the kitchen each time special order information is entered at the POS register. However, in order for the POS register to generate the seal printing data and send the seal printing data to the kitchen printer each time a special order is received, the existing application program that is run by the POS register must be modified, thus increasing the cost of introducing a system for locally printing special order seals.